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The status of hip-hop in China is being reshaped by the sudden popularity experienced by the genre in the last few years. An aspect that has been overlooked by scholarly research on Chinese hip-hop authenticity is that underground rappers may have to simultaneously assume multiple personal, professional, and social roles while attempting to maintain authenticity. This article provides an empirical account of how authenticity and the 'keep it real' motto are understood and negotiated by underground Chinese rappers. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 rappers, this article proposes the notion of everyday authenticity as a means for rappers to draw inspiration from unembellished daily realities while also using music to alleviate everyday hardships. The article also examines the challenges faced by underground rappers in the attempt to retain this type of authenticity in the mainstream, commercially driven environment. The tension is resolved by creating an autonomous realm for rappers that come 'out of the street', which allows rappers to claim legitimacy inside and outside the underground. This article provides an extension of the conceptualisation of authenticity in the Chinese hip-hop context, thus critically contributing to the global debate around hip-hop authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although recent sociolinguistic research on high performance has shown that persona construction is multidimensional and context‐specific, little work has explored how interactions between personae affect their shared semiotic landscape. This study focuses on stylistic practices in 2017′s The Rap of China, China's first hip hop‐themed competition show. A quantitative analysis was conducted to describe the rhyming styles of contemporary Chinese rappers. Based on language uses, visual representations, and lyrical themes, we then identify three rapper personae and discuss the semantic dimensions of hip hop authenticity invoked by each persona. Finally, through an analysis of a combative rap performance and reactions to it, we argue that contestation among different personae shapes the ideological landscape of "authentic Chinese hip hop." This work demonstrates the potential of the semiotic landscape as a theoretical tool for the analysis of digital communities and cultural forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the latter half of the 1980s, a popular dance craze known as "piliwu" swept urban communities across China. A Chinese translation of the U.S. media term "breakdancing," piliwu incorporated what were then two new styles of U.S. urban popular dance—New York-based b-boying/b-girling or breaking (characterized by inversions and dance battles) and California-based popping and locking (characterized by the robot and the moonwalk). Appearing in parks, on nightclub stages, and in popular films, piliwu was China's first localized movement of hip-hop culture, preceding the introduction of rap music by more than a decade. Like other aspects of popular culture in 1980s China, piliwu reflected new circuits of intercultural exchange between China and the United States during the first decade of China's Reform Era. In particular, it demonstrated the impact of U.S. popular music, embodied by stars such as Michael Jackson, and the mediating role that Hong Kong played in introducing these new cultural forms to the lives of Chinese youth. This article follows the career of Tao Jin, China's first hip-hop dance star, and analyzes piliwu dance choreography recorded in Tao's debut film, the 1988 Chinese dance film Rock Youth. Reading this film alongside media reports and testimonials from members of China's piliwu generation, the article reconstructs the history of the piliwu movement. It argues for the central influence of U.S. pop culture icon Michael Jackson, the growth of China's underground commercial dance "zouxue" ("moonlighting") economy, and the agency of dancers' bodies in transnational movements of media culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hip-hop culture has evolved into a global phenomenon, attracting extensive academic research on its adaptation and localization in different societies. However, most studies have either neglected the influence of political economic power on hybridization or have overestimated the rationality of the artists in hip-hop culture. This study adopted critical transculturalism theory to shed light on the agency and power relations involved in the localization and mainstream emergence of Chinese hip-hop music from both longitudinal and comparative perspectives. The findings, which are based on qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis of news articles published in the three golden years (2008, 2010, and 2017) of the development of Chinese hip-hop music, suggest that whereas cultural and political factors were influential on both the localization and mainstream emergence processes, economic factors played a greater role in mainstream emergence. The enhancement of literacy in professional knowledge aroused public interest, and the use of symbolic hybridity created a role model for underground rappers and attracted social attention. Both these factors helped Chinese hip-hop music enter the mainstream industry. The idea of symbolic hybridity proposed in this study, which provides a mesolevel perspective, is worth further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common interest amongst Chinese hip hop scholars concerns the construction of a local youth identity via the negotiation between the logics of hip hop culture, the practices of the local underground hip hop community, and the cultural governance of the state. Building on previous studies about these multi-faceted negotiations before 2017, or before The Rap of China phenomenon, this paper explores the politics and aesthetics of featuring in post-2017 Chinese hip hop. Rather than dwelling upon the authenticity of hip hop, this paper is more interested in Chinese hip hop's variations of authenticity through the practice of competitive collaborations between local and non-local artists. I seek to demonstrate a spectrum of 'realness' in the post-2017 era with three case studies: Vava, Kris Wu, and Higher Brothers. While these rappers negotiate with the values of hip hop and state expectations differently, they are all nonetheless 'keepin it real'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research inspects the media and public discourses surrounding the first season of the sensational Chinese reality TV rap competition, The Rap of China (iQiyi, 2017). Through the combined theoretical lenses of queer China studies and global media studies, I examine the show's framing of linguistic, geocultural, gender and sexual variations in its construction of a nationalistic imaginary alongside China's media and cultural globalization. I reveal a revised fantasy of 'authentic Chineseness' projected by the competition. I then offer a careful reading of the post-competition sexual scandal and the government's 2018 crackdown on Chinese hip-hop. I consider the official criticism and censorship of Chinese rap as the government's response to the public cultural panic over the threat to China's hetero-patriarchal-structured sexual morality. I show that a self-contradictory imaginary of a globalized, modernized and diversified 'Sinophone' community located within mainland China was created and positioned at the party-state's moral and cultural centre. In this imaginary, nonnormative cultures, identities, languages and forms of intimacy, which have often been ostracized or degraded in the linguistic, geopolitical and conjugal paradigms of mainstream Chinese culture, are enabled to negotiate a place within official culture and mass media, though often in limited and problematic ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online reality show The Rap of China has become ingrained in Chinese popular culture. However, since 18 January 2018, the hip-hop subculture in China has been censored by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. This study aims to analyse the cultural resonance of Chinese hip-hop, and to identify how hip-hop reflects the changing contours of ideology in Chinese digital youth culture. The study applies critical discourse analysis to lyrics of rap songs performed on The Rap of China by the show's co-champions: PG-One and Gai; it conducts 52 semi-structured interviews with audience members to investigate how they interpret these lyrics, and presents a comparative analysis of PG-One's and Gai's raps on that basis. The findings suggest that Chinese hip-hop culture has its roots in the hybridized 'real' which is a globalized hybrid cultural product that modifies the Western genre of hip-hop with distinct Chinese notions of conflicting authenticity, centred around the representations of 'jianghu flow' with loyalty, struggle, and compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on data collected through interviewing b-girls (breakdancing girls) and participant observation of b-girling, we analyse gender inequalities confronting women who practise breakdancing in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, document these women's struggles against gender inequality, and illustrate that these inequalities and struggles differ somewhat from those found in the US context and even from those found in studies of women who practise rap music. We outline the contours of a Chinese hip-hop feminism and suggest adopting it to investigate the local specificities of hip-hop-based gender politics in Chinese societies. We find that culture is a key part of the matrix of domination on which Chinese hip-hop-based gender politics focuses, but that racism is not. We discuss how such local specificities pose difficulties for the internationalisation of hip-hop feminism. We also construct a tentative signpost for understanding how a feminist assessment of hip-hop based on research on breaking differs from that based on research on rap. The signpost, which sums up the central findings of current studies and the present one, is "remaking hip-hop, redoing gender": the remaking of hip-hop in a way that is fairer for women and the redoing of gender by b-girls for themselves, their audiences and society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike several studies on rap musicians and the lyrics of their songs, this study examines both obvious and obtuse meaning embedded in the styles of Chinese Rapper, GAI, and their implications for hegemony in his country. Following state censorship, GAI changed his style from that of a gangster to a patriot. On the surface, the style change indicates sustaining the hegemony upheld by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). However, this study argues that the state crackdown on hip hop culture, its styles included, engenders a paradox for hegemony in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay unravels the coalescence between bottom-up youth culture and state-led ideological work in China by examining the patriotic hip-hop music videos of a Chinese youth band. I attend to the ways in which the state-centric ideology is aesthetically evoked by co-opting popular cultural formats, maneuvering grassroots nationalistic expressions and appropriating symbols of both tradition and modernity. Hip-hop is thus localized and sanitized as a cultural medium of propaganda. The limitations of such co-optative tactics are also discussed, particularly the tradeoff between ideological control and authentic expressivity, and the risk of de-sublimating auratic cultural symbols for political persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, the academic discussion of graffiti culture in Greater China borrows a set of theoretical assumptions or preoccupations based on Euro-American graffiti subculture practices, focusing on the artistic dimensions of graffiti. This article, based on an ethnography in Macau, tries to re-examine two forms of local graffiti culture – the one influenced by hip hop culture, the other by the Chinese writing tradition – and endeavours to analyse the logic of their different spatial strategies and embodied practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The linguistic dimensions of globalized hip-hop cannot be understood simply as a byproduct of English as an American export. As hip-hop mobilizes, it is common (and arguably necessary) for global hip-hop communities to struggle through purposeful, semiotically rooted dialectics over what constitutes “authentic” and respectable forms of local hip-hop identity (Pennycook, 2007; Omoniyi, 2009). In many ways, hip-hop in China is in the midst of that very struggle. During the past decade, relaxed economic regulations (Fang, 2006) and cultural allure have attracted several foreigners to China, many of whom have taken an active role alongside local enthusiasts in formulating a sense of Chinese hip-hop identity. This study uses Agha's emblematic figures of identity (2007) as a framework for bringing forth the following research question: How are intercultural processes of identity formation between local and foreign artists mediated by language in the Chinese hip-hop community? Data were gathered through interviews and lyric analysis, as well as recording-studio and live performance observations. Contrary to folk and academic criticisms claiming that foreign presence leads to mimicry or cultural “pollution” (De Kloet, 2005), the findings suggest that in many cases global hip-hop resources are interculturally recruited and (re)analyzed according to their ability to promote practices rooted in local significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular music in Nigeria, especially guerrilla hip-hop, seems to be enjoying unprecedented popularity since the enthronement of democracy in 1999. This popular art form, with its focus on urban street life, has become a dominant means of expression within contemporary Nigerian adolescent/youth culture. Interestingly, therefore, it speaks directly to issues of identity, culture, nationhood and nationalism. Invariably, this art form has become a pie chart from where Nigeria's sociopolitical position can be easily appraised. The paper addresses numerous issues, but most importantly, it examines how Hip-hop artists experience and interpret their lives, and how they respond to conditions in their communities. How do popular music artists who emerge from economically and marginalised social contexts use their song lyrics to facilitate a consciousness of resistance among the members of their respective social groups? These questions are explored in a content analysis of the music of African China, the most socially conscious of all the recent popular artists in Nigeria. The study attempts to explore the role of music in the construction of counter-hegemonic alternative culture in impoverished postcolonial Nigeria. The analysis suggests that China's lyrical project of resistance incorporates a three-part method of social critique: (1) depictions of the suffering endured as a member of a marginalised social group, (2) critiques of and resistance against social structures that produce this suffering, and (3) calls for unity, particularly among the members of the respective marginalised groups, for the sake of improving the conditions of social life. I therefore argue that despite the fact that popular music in Nigeria has become the vibrant means of social criticism, it has equally reconstructed another realm or site for sociopolitical engagements – a public sphere from where government can be appraised and the people can come to terms with the socio-realities of their lives as postcolonial people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Extending research on the global in uence and impact of American hip hop culture, Xuexin Liu describes the hip hop phenomenon in China and explores its social and cultural implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the growing influence of the genre of Chinese hip hop in the Taiwanese and Hong Kong popular music scenes as well as Chinese communities in the U.S. and Singapore. Conceptual frameworks are explored concerning the study of hip hop and Chinese popular culture. The evolving trends in each of the Chinese societies, the physical and geographical influences and the socio-cultural impacts are the aspects of Chinese hip hop discussed.

• I propose a dispersion model in explaining the outcome of political interventions in genres. In the case of censorship of an artistic genre, the stylistic conventions of the censored genre are dispersed from its salient works of that genre to less influential ones as well as to adjacent genres. • The dispersion model is substantiated in the empirical analysis of the Hip-Hop censorship in China in 2018. Investigating an original dataset of 53,364 songs, I found Chinese Hip-Hop songs sound significantly different after the censorship than those before; the difference is more obvious among high-profile songs than low-profile ones. The censorship also made Hip-Hop musicians engage less with topics related to violence or deviant behaviors but more with sex, albeit in a covered form and not necessarily related to sexual conduct per se. • The Hip-Hop censorship also affected other musical genres: The close genre (Rock) sounds more like the censored genre (Hip-Hop) after the censorship, while the category reflecting the trending genres (Pop) sounds less like the censored trending genre (Hip-Hop); the impact on these two genres is more salient among their low-profile songs. The distanced genre (Folk) was generally intact. • The musical similarity of the songs and the topic prevalences in the lyrics are measured by using a set of computational tools, including Music Information Retrieval algorithms that synthesize audio signal processing and neural networks, as well as topic models. How do political interventions reshape genre boundaries? Previous studies on genres only tangentially touch on this question as they mostly focus on the artistic, economic, or critical consequences of genre spanning. This paper fills in this gap by exploring the impact of music censorship on the censored genre and other related genres. Using an original dataset of 53,364 songs released on a Chinese online music platform, I study how Hip-Hop censorship in China in 2018 impacted Hip-Hop as well as Pop, Rock, and Folk songs in terms of how they sound and what topics are engaged in the lyrics. I propose a novel, computational approach to measure sound similarities between songs by using Music Information Retrieval (MIR) algorithms which synthesize audio signal processing and neural networks. I also measure the change of topic prevalence in song lyrics by using topic models supplemented with a dictionary approach. I found that post-censorship Hip-Hop songs sound significantly different from pre-censorship ones, with a bigger impact on the high-profile songs. Moreover, Rock, as a close genre to Hip-Hop, became more "Hip-Hoppy", while Pop, a mixed category that reflects trending genres, became less "Hip-Hoppy"; the impact on these two genres is more salient among their low-profile songs. Folk, a genre distanced from Hip-Hop, remained generally untouched. The censorship also made Hip-Hop musicians engage less with topics related to violence and deviant behaviors but more with sexual terms, albeit in a covered form and not necessarily related to sexual conduct per se. The findings suggest a dispersion model in explaining the outcome of political interventions in genres, where stylistic conventions of the censored genre are dispersed from salient works of that genre to less influential ones as well as to adjacent genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]